Notes on Seminole Negroes in the Bahamas

Notes on Seminole Negroes in the BahamasAuthor(s): Kenneth W. PorterSource: The Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jul., 1945), pp. 56-60Published by: Florida Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30138580 .

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NOTES ON SEMINOLE NEGROES IN THE BAHAMAS

by KENNETH W. PORTER

On telling Alan Lomax, folksong collector, of my interest in and research on Seminole Negroes he exclaimed "Do you know there are some in the Bahamas today?"

I told him I had followed their trail from Florida to Oklahoma, to Texas, to Mexico, but not yet in the other direction.

"Yes" he said "I haven't seen them but they are said to be in the northern part of Andros island. I heard about them when I was in the Ba- hamas. The other Negroes are afraid of them- say they're wild men, live in trees, shoot fish with bows and arrows, and are all named Bowlegs."

"Bowlegs ? That's a Seminole Negro name all right-from King Bowlegs and his children Billy and Harriet Bowlegs, who were the owners or pa- trons of so many of the Seminole Negroes. I've enccunltered that name among the Seminole Negroes along the whole trail to Mexico. And-by the way -wasn't there a 'Mr. Bowlegs' among the singers you recorded in the Bahamas several years ago?"a

"Yes, he was a stray from Andros but had been brought from there at a very early age and didn't remember much about it."

Mr. Lomax's account bore, on the face of it, evidence of a basis in fact. It is unlikely, for example, that the name Bowlegs could have been a coinci- dence or an invention. Also, hunting or fishing with bow and arrow might be expected among isolated 1. The Library of Congress: Music division, Check-list of

recorded songs in the English language in the Archivue of American Folk Song. Washington, D. C., 1942, vol. A-K pp. 8, 205. "And then I lay my body down" and "Johnny come blow the orgain." Sung by Mr. Bowlegs, Nassau, Bahamas, 1935.



NOTES ON SEMINOLE NEGROES IN THE BAHAMAS 57

Seminole Negroes; for, as late as 1842, the hostile Seminole Indians in Florida were saving their am- munition by using bows and arrows for hunting "and could kill a deer with an arrow almost as certainly as with a ball.'2 As to their living in trees, we'll forget that until further evidence is available.

How and why did these Seminole Negroes reach the Bahamas ? The answer must lie primarily in the unsettled state of Florida during the last years of Spanish rule. Runaway slaves had for genera- tions fled from Georgia and South Carolina plantations to seek refuge among the Seminole Indians, and their numbers reached such proportions that in 1812 and 1813, and again in 1816 and 1818, Geor- gia and Tennessee volunteers and United States military and naval forces invading Florida broke up Negro settlements. The first invasion was beat- en off, though the Seminole chief King Payne (Payne is still probably the most common surname among Seminole Negroes) lost his life in battle; the second destroyed Payne's town of Alachua, and the town of his brother and successor Bowlegs, and drove the Indians and Negroes west to the Su- wannee; the third resulted in the destruction of the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola, built and equipped by the British during the War of 1812 and garri- soned by runaway Negroes; and the fourth, under Andrew Jackson, destroyed the Negro and Indian towns on the Suwannee which acknowledged Bow- leg's kingship, and drove the survivors southward. "The remnant of the black and colored people who had served with Colonel Nichols [a British offcier] during the late war [of 1812], fugitive slaves from all the southern section of the union, as well as from the Spanish plantations in Florida and from 2. Foreman. Grant, Indian removal, Norman, Okla., 1932, p. 382.



58 THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

St. Augustine, followed up on the steps of the In- dians, and formed considerable settlements on the waters of Tampa bay ... [some] made their way down to cape Florida and the reefs, about which they were collected within a year and a half past [this account was first published in 1823] to up- wards of three hundred; vast numbers have been ... since carried off by the Bahama wreckers ... [and] smuggled into the remoter islands, and at this period, large numbers have been found on St. Andrews [Andros] and the Biminis.""

The Bahamas would have been a natural refuge for Seminole Negroes, because the Seminole had long enjoyed close trade-relations with those islands. Alexander Arbuthnot, the merchant, and Robert C. Ambrister, the soldier and adventurer, who had been executed virtually at Jackson's orders in 1818 for intervening in the affairs of the Seminole in a fashion hostile to the United States, had both come to Florida from the Bahamas.

The Seminole War, which broke out in 1835 and was supported in some quarters as much by a de- sire to capture Negroes living among the Indians as to remove the Indians themselves to the west of the Mississippi, again threw the Negro population of Florida into confusion. Hundreds of slaves left the plantations to join the hostile Seminole, or were carried away, voluntarily or involuntarily, by the insurgents. Creek Indians were recruited as scouts for the United States forces by the promise of such booty, including Negroes, as they might capture from the enemy. It was natural that the harassed Negroes should again think of the Bahamas as a haven of refuge, as they had been a score of years earlier. Gen. T. S. Jesup, commanding United 3. Vignoles, Charles, Observations Upon the Ftoridas, Brooklyn,

p. 134.



NOTES ON SEMINOLE NEGROES IN THE BAHAMAS 59

States forces in Florida, wrote from Tampa Bay, June 8, 1837, to Joseph McBride: "From the best information I can obtain, many of the negroes who have run away from their masters within a few years past, as well as the Indian negroes claimed by white people, have gone to those islands [the Bahamas]. I think it probable that all the negroes in the nation who can find the means of escape will follow."4 Gen. Jessup was probably referring, among other sources of information, to a report that a large schooner had been observed about July 13, 1836, at Indian Key, full of Negroes, probably Indian Negroes from New River, who were escaping from Florida." (Cuba, as well as the Bahamas, it should be said, was probably also a haven of refuge). The above amply confirms and explains an exten- sive migration of Seminole Negroes to the Bahamas over a century ago.

But have these Seminole Negroes to any signifi- cant extent preserved their identity and are they to be identified with the folk reported by Alan Lomax ? The late Elsie Clews Parsons reports in a folklore publication that "from about 1830 to 1836, from the Florida everglades region, Negroes with Indian blood migrated to Andros. . . . The In- dian descendants are located for the most part, however, at Nicolls Town, and my stay there was brief." Miss Parsons lists, among her folktale informants at the latter place, two schoolboys, Samuel L. and W. S. Bowlegs, and remarks that "Billy Bowlegs was once the vernacular on Andros for the Seminole Indian immigrant." She also mentions customs among the Andros islanders which have also been reported among the Seminole Negroes of the Texas-Mexican border--" settin' ups" with the

4. 25th cong., 3d sess., H. of R., War Dep't, doec. 225, p. 17. 5. 2(5th cong., 1st sess., Sen., doc. 278 pp. 73-74.



60 THE FLORIDA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

dead, with prayer, singing, food, and drink, called "devil dances" by the Anglican Church.6 These wakes, however, could be drawn f r o m a common African origin. It would seem to be impossible, however to connect the t r e - dwelling, fish-shooting, "wild" Bowlgs of Andros Island directly with the schoolboy Bowlegs encountered at Nicolls Town.

Examination of a dozen or more handbooks, guide-books, histories, travel-accounts, dealing with the Bahamas, reveals no further specific reference to the Seminole Negroes of Andros Island. There is found, however, in a publication of about twenty years ago the following: "It is to be hoped that the mystery of the interior of this land [Andros] will some day be unfathomed by means of aviation, when the allegations of explorers as to the existence of a tribe of people who hunt with bows and arrows can be investigated." Here, probably, are the wild, bow-and-arrow hunting, tree-dwelling people re- ferred to by Alan Lomax. Whether they are to be identified, as by his informants, with Seminole Negroes, awaits further investigation. 6. Parsons, Elsie Clews, Folk-Tah s of Andros Island, Bahamas

(Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, xiii), N. Y., 1918, ix, xiii, xv, xvi, 87.

7. Moseley, Mary, The Bahamas handbook, Nassau, 1926, p. 66.



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Notes on Seminole Negroes in the Bahamas